![gridded plan gridded plan](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/58cf/017e/e58e/ceb1/2800/0170/newsletter/GRID_plan.jpg)
The settlement soon got snapped to the grid like Legos. It was the moment Chicago ceased to be a wilderness outpost and became a city for sale. It was less than half a square mile, bounded by Kinzie on the north, Washington on the south, Jefferson on the west and Dearborn on the east, but it was the template for a network that would eventually cover the 234 square miles of Chicago-and extend into suburbs beyond its borders.Īugust 4, 1830, the date Thompson published his plat, “marks the birthday of Chicago as a town, and the ‘Fort Dearborn settlement’ disappeared,” Andreas wrote. Since Thompson was subdividing a township section, he simply repeated that pattern in miniature when he designed Chicago’s first street map. Illinois had already been divided into square townships and sections by the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. The man hired to plat a town at the mouth of the Chicago River was James Thompson, a surveyor from Kaskaskia, and the father of the Chicago Grid. The state decided to lay out towns along the prospective route, and sell lots to pay for the canal. Andreas in his History of Early Chicago, “Chicago had but a mythical existence, the name applying sometimes to the river and again to a cluster of cabins along its marshy shores or sandy banks.” However, Congress had recently granted land to Illinois for the construction of what would become the Illinois & Michigan Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. The values that shaped us as a city also shaped the streets on which we walk and drive.Ĭhicago’s grid system dates back to 1830, making it even older than the city itself. Why are Chicago’s streets such a near-perfect arrangement of 90-degree angles? The reason has to do with both Midwestern practicality and commerce. (The least-perfect grid is Charlotte, a Sunbelt city whose street system is more entropic than Rome or São Paulo.) On a scale of 0 to 1, in which 1 is a perfect grid, Chicago scores 0.9. A recent academic study, “Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy,” by Geoff Boeing, looked at the maps of 100 major world cities, and found that Chicago’s “exhibits the closest approximation of a single perfect grid.” Nowhere else have urban planners been so successful in imposing Euclidean order on natural surroundings. It is right to compare Chicago’s street network to something so obsessively exact. “It looks like electronic circuitry,” I commented, and the salesman agreed. As the plane passed from the blankness of Lake Michigan, we looked out the window at a perfectly ruled network of glowing orange streetlamps-illuminated squares repeating themselves toward the horizon in three directions. This topic was last modified: Version 8.I was flying into O’Hare one night, sitting next to an electronics salesman. Use this dialog to locate and select a previously created grid file.Ĭheck to plot a reference grid for the third profile. Click the Browse button and the Select grid file dialog will be displayed. Use this dialog to locate and select a previously created grid file.Ĭheck to plot a reference grid for the second profile.Ĭheck to enable/disable the plotting of profile #3. A maximum range of 4 decades is used.Ĭheck to enable/disable the plotting of profile #2. The Line Attributes tool will be displayed.Ĭheck to plot a reference grid for the first profile.Ĭheck to plot using logarithmic scaling. To edit the line style, click in the box.
![gridded plan gridded plan](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2zu2PnaOdAs/maxresdefault.jpg)
The rectangle box to the right of the browse button displays the selected line style.Use this dialog to locate and select a previously created grid file.
![gridded plan gridded plan](https://i2.wp.com/www.allcadblocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Architecture-Sections-108.jpg)
![gridded plan gridded plan](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5fLHQG9NjXg/T1AsfYsmoEI/AAAAAAAAAjI/kiIfmnisCgw/s1600/Florence_Grid.jpg)
Profiles Tab Profile #1Ĭheck to enable/disable the plotting of profile #1. Use this tab to plot profiles of gridded data on the section plot(s). Create Section(s) from Plan Map - Profiles